Novi Connect

Novi Connect, based in the San Francisco Bay Area with offices in New York and beyond, is a data infrastructure platform that helps consumer packaged goods and retail brands get their products recommended in AI driven commerce. Founded in 2020 and led by co founder and chief executive Kimberly Shenk, it raised a Series B round from investors including Greylock, Khosla Ventures, Maveron, and Tiger Global, with clean living advocate Jessica Alba among its backers. Its thesis is that product data is broken infrastructure, and that as shoppers increasingly ask AI what to buy, the brands that win are the ones whose products are understood, trusted, and consistently recommended on the AI shelf.

Novi acts as a verified data network sitting between brands, certification bodies, standards holders, and major retailers and marketplaces like Target, Ulta, Sephora, and Amazon. It structures and optimizes product content and trust signals at the SKU level so that AI systems can select, rank, and recommend the right products, verifies claims about ingredients, materials, certifications, and business practices, and distributes that high authority product data at scale to the places where shoppers and AI models search. On top of the data layer, its AI Shopping Optimizer gives brands measurable visibility into how they appear in AI driven results, where they are trusted, where they are missing, and how they compare within a category, and recommends the certifications and standards a brand should pursue to earn its place. The company reports lifts such as a large increase in AI selection rates for optimized products.

Novi is a focused data and optimization platform rather than an autonomous agent that acts across a business, so on the axes that describe a deployed agent, security governance, deployment options, model choice, a library of prebuilt agents, and computer use, it is not the right lens, and its composite score reflects that narrowness. Its strengths are verified product knowledge and clear measurement of AI visibility tied to sales outcomes. For a consumer packaged goods or retail brand that wants its individual products to be chosen by AI shopping systems, and to measure and improve that visibility, Novi is a well aligned and differentiated fit; a team wanting a general agent platform, or capabilities beyond product data and AI discovery, will find it purpose built for the AI shelf.